Day of Travel

We got up at 4:00 am to get ready for our flight to Haikou at 8:00 am. From Beijing to Haikou is a 3.5 hour flight, which is nothing when compared to the flight from Chicago to Beijing. We flew on Hainan Airlines which is a very nice air carrier. The first thing I noticed when we landed in Haikou is the heat. It is sweltering here. Beijing is nothing compared to this. I checked weather.com and the heat index is 110 degrees, plus high humidity. HOT. The second thing I noticed is the total lack of any English anywhere. In Beijing, things were easy to read and navigate as English was listed on everything. This is probably due the Olympics and all of the foreigners ready to enter the city, but Haikou not so much. We checked into our hotel around 1:00 pm and did a little unpacking. Our room is small, smelly, dated, and overall pretty crappy. I guess we will have to deal with it as we will be here for 6 nights. The first order of business is of course to go find water. Since there are no stores in this area, we ended up purchasing water at a street vendor. I will have to go back there at a later time because I noticed that there were other vendors selling fresh fruit nearby. After our little water escapade, we decided to head out and look for some good old American food. We know that there are McDonalds and KFCs around, so we had our guide write on a piece of paper in Chinese where we wanted to go and our hotel name so all we had to do is give the piece of paper to the cab driver and he will know what to do. We hop in the cab and give the piece of paper to the cabbie and he takes off. While driving a thunderstorm hits and it is pouring. He stops in front of a building downtown and gestures that we owe him a certain amount of money. The problem is that we don't see any McDonalds or KFC around, we just see a big building with people pressed up against the wall trying to stay out of the rain. We then try communicating with the cabbie that there are no McDonalds or KFC around, and he motions that the restaurants are in the building upstairs. We say fine, pay him his money, and venture out into the pouring rain to get into the building. The building ends up being a large department store and there are signs in the store that state "American Food" and an arrow pointing in a direction. We walk in this direction and find nothing. We continue to walk around this store and still find nothing. Luckily, we run into a girl that speaks English and she asks a clerk where the American Food is. Her response is that everything is under construction. Wonderful. So we head back out into the rain and notice that there is a Pizza Hut not too far from the store. Luckily, the Pizza Hut is not under construction and we have delicious garlic bread and pepperoni pizza. After dinner we hail a cab and have a special commute back to the hotel. We must of avoided 30 accidents on the way back. They drive crazy here. Driving on the wrong side of the road in heavy traffic, running down pedestrians, coming up behind a bicyclist and flashing the brights while lying on the horn, it was truly an amazing site and one that made me laugh because I have never seen anything like this before.

On a different note, tomorrow morning we get Zach. We are so nervous and excited to finally meet our little guy. We hope things go well and he adapts quickly. Being the worrier that I am, I'm worried that there isn't enough stuff around here for him to do. Where we are located isn't exactly child friendly. I just hope we can find a way to keep him entertained for 5 nights before we head to the White Swan hotel.

I also want to address the lack of photos on my blog. While we were touring yesterday my battery died and I had to rely on my mom taking photos. Unfortunately, her camera is not compatible with my software on the computer to download photos. Now, I am happy to say that my battery is completely restored and there will be pictures tomorrow of our big day.